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Apple Books digital narration

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Re: Apple Books digital narration

#81

Post by rickdeckard »

rdevsrex wrote: post #43
rickdeckard wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the cat is already out of the bag, and the death of human narration is imminent. The fight now seems to be whether this transformation happens only in production, or companies like Apple succeed in breaking the total Audiobook price apart into "license" and "production", only buying the license and have the production done on their proprietary servers. Overall, I agree it's inevitable that this results in a s…

One of the things I like is when the narrator has to suppress a laugh during a funny passage, or can express a character's anger or frustration. Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize.

> One of the things I like is when the narrator has to suppress a laugh during a funny passage, or can express a character's anger or frustration.

I doubt there are big issues for an AI to verbally mimic emotion. Placing emotion correctly in a long narration might be tricky if there are no indicators in the text, but I'm sure there will be a convenient self-service authoring tool where the Author/Publisher can adjust the emotion with a slider if he wants to finetune the result...

> Until AI is so good that it can mimic emotion, I think there will be a market for human narrators. Of course it will be smaller than what it is now, but I think people will specialize.

A smaller market means higher cost per-unit, so higher prices per Audiobook. If the publisher needs to meet a specific price (i.e. to be listed on flat-fee audiobook-portals) he might be forced to produce digital narration as a default, which means the market for an additional "premium human narration" will have to prove itself first.

I doubt that such a bar will be reached in most cases. It's more likely that people complaining about bad narration will put pressure on AI-engines to improve, but not form a market where a critical mass will pay additional 20$ for human narration...

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#82

Post by paulryanrogers »

leokennis wrote: post #72
cprecioso wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. I don't feel like this is a product for carefully producing audiobooks, but to create them by the pound, so to speak. I'd say it's a move for the "make your own business through audiobooks" people [1] -- very strange for A…

To me this feels like the automated video slideshows that Apple Photos (and undoubtedly Google Photos) makes for you. Perfectly fine, but indeed even on a casual watch you notice mistakes/imperfections you'd never make if you were producing such slideshow manually. But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? I think almost any audiobook listener will vastl…

Agreed. I bought an old Kindle for traveling because I could use its TTS to listen to ebooks. Now that's a common feature of most reader apps, yet at the time it was rare and even newer Kindles had dropped TTS.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#83

Post by 33955985 »

So happy to hear Apple putting African American voices front and center for this initiative. Along with Google’s push to make camera lenses / computational photography more accurate for darker skin (and Apple following suit) this feels like a real step forward for inclusion.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#85

Post by davidzweig »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #68
andy_ppp wrote: post #63

"Once your request is submitted, it takes one to two months to process the book and conduct quality checks." My guess is that these generated voices are far from perfect and someone has to go in and crank the algorithm to get a fair number of passages to not sound strange. Even in the example Helena there is a word at the end of a sentence that sounds like it should be in the middle and has a bit of weirdness to it.…

Why is that we still can't have a perfect or near-perfect text-to-speech given all the astonishing advances in ML taking place? Is TTS an area nobody is really interested in or is it harder than generating beautiful pictures and sophisticated writings? This thing by Apple already sounds way better than the best I heard previously (NextUp Ivona) but it is not an instant-result offline tool yet and that's sad.

I wanted to make a human-like reading feature for our language-learning software. Training a model isn't too hard using something like https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS.

The weak link was the available free/open datasets. You needed a single speaker with a pleasant voice, 20hrs+ material from varied sources, recorded in a good recording enviroment with a good mic etc. For English, the go-to was LJSpeech, which doesn't fulfill all these requirements. I say 'was', as I haven't followed developments recently.

Last year we decided to make our own dataset with a Irish woman, Jenny. She has a soft Irish lilt.

Never got around around to training the model, but I will upload the raw audio and prompts here in a few hours (need to pay my internet bill in town..):

https://github.com/dioco-group/jenny-tts-dataset/blob/main/R...

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#86

Post by 33955985 »

BuckyBeaver wrote: post #16

"Digitally narrated titles are a valuable complement to professionally narrated audiobooks" Yeah, right. What a lame attempt to deflect the (fully warranted) criticism that this will put audiobook narrators out of work.

Huh? The professionally narrated audiobooks don’t get memory hole’d from the earth because Apple announced this service. The sentence you quoted is intended to emphasize that professionally narrated audiobooks will continue to be available on the platform.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#87

Post by qwerty456127 »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #75
qwerty456127 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that we still can't have a perfect or near-perfect text-to-speech given all the astonishing advances in ML taking place? Is TTS an area nobody is really interested in or is it harder than generating beautiful pictures and sophisticated writings? This thing by Apple already sounds way better than the best I heard previously (NextUp Ivona) but it is not an instant-result offline tool yet and that's sad.

My uneducated opinion on the matter is that we are more tolerant of subtle errors in pictures and writings than we are in sounds. Subtle variations of tone can change the meaning of a conversation that words on paper just can't convey.

As a person who has listened to a number of non-fiction books narrated by Microsoft Sam I don't really mind "subtle variations of tone" :-) This Apple thing will already satisfy me if they release it as an offline app for converting plain text files into audio files.

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#89

Post by drexlspivey »

33955985 wrote: post #83

So happy to hear Apple putting African American voices front and center for this initiative. Along with Google’s push to make camera lenses / computational photography more accurate for darker skin (and Apple following suit) this feels like a real step forward for inclusion.

Voices have a race?

Re: Apple Books digital narration

#90

Post by 33955985 »

londons_explore wrote: post #60
dmitriid wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm very surprised they make this a feature for authors, rather than a feature for users. Licensing. Audiobooks are a different license from ebooks, and trying to narrate an audiobook will infringe the licensing terms.

Apple is big enough they could just tell authors "here is our new narration feature for users. If you don't like it, pull your books off our platform.". No author is going to win a twitter flame war because they don't want a 'speak it out loud' button provided by apple on their ebooks. Besides - all ebooks on Apple platforms already support this via: Settings → General → Accessibility → VoiceOver → ON turns on the Vo…

Apple is big enough to have the EU dictate what port to ship their phones with, too. The regulatory landscape requires careful navigating.
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